of this rescuing host is becoming more and more apparent. From every
section they come, the glistening surfaces of their polished vehicles
and implements shining in the sun, the stacks of their engines
issuing volumes of smoke. Fire boxes drop fiery sparks as they speed
past neighboring corners, the firemen stoking as they come. Groups of
hook-and-ladder handlers are unhooking and making ready their ladders.
Others, standing upright on their careening vehicles, are adjusting
rubber coats and making ready to invade the precincts of danger at
once. The art of balancing on one foot while tugging at great coils of
hose that are being uncoiled from speeding vehicles is being deftly
illustrated. These men like this sort of thing. It is something to
do. They are trained men, ready to fight the fire demon at a moment’s
notice, and they are going about their work with the ease and grace of
those who feel the show as well as the importance of that which they
do. Once more, after days of humdrum, they are the center of a tragedy,
the cynosure of many eyes. It is exhilarating thus to be gazed at, as
any one can see. They swing down from their machines in front of this
holocaust with the nonchalance of men going to a dinner.
And the police reserves, they are here now too. This indifferent block,
so recently the very heart of humdrum, is now the center of a great
company of policemen. The regular width of the street from side to
side and corner to corner has been cleared and is now really parked
off by policemen pushing back the gaping and surging throng. There are
cries of astonishment as the onrushing flames leap now from building
to building, shouts of “Stay where you are!” to helpless women and
children standing in open windows from which the smoke is threatening
to drive them; there are great, wave-like pushings forward and
recedings, as the officers, irritated by the eagerness of the crowd,
endeavor to hold it in check.
“McGinnity and six men to the roof of 354!” comes the bellowing cry of
a megaphone in the hands of a battalion chief.
“Hennessy and Company H, spread out the life net!”
“Williams! Williams! You and Dubo scale the walls quick! Get that woman
above there! Turn your hose on there, Horton, turn your hose on! Where
is Company B? Can’t you people get in line for the work here?”
The assurance of the firemen, so used to the petty blazes that could be
extinguished in half an hour by the application of a stream or two of
water, has been slightly shaken by the evidence of the explosive nature
of the material stored in the basement of this building. The sight of
people hurrying from doorways with their few little valuables gathered
up in trembling arms, or screaming in windows from which the flames
and smoke have fairly shut off rescue, is, after all, disconcerting to
the bravest. While the last explosion is shooting upward and outward
and flames from the previously ignited ones are bursting through the
side walls of adjoining structures and cutting off escape for a score,
the firemen are loosing ladders and hose from a dozen still rolling
vehicles and setting about the task of rescuing the victims. Suddenly a
cask of kerosene, heated to the boiling point in the seething cauldron
of the cellar, explodes, throwing a shower of blazing oil aloft
which descends as a rain of fire. Over the crowd it pours, a licking,
death-dealing rain, which sends them plunging madly away. In the rush,
women and children are trampled and more than one over-ambitious
sightseer is struck by a falling dab of flaming oil. A police captain,
standing in the middle of the street, is caught by a falling shower and
instantly ignited. An old Polish Jew, watching the scene from the door
of his eight-by-ten shop, is caught on the hand and sent crying within.
Others run madly with burning coats and blazing hats, while over the
roofs and open spaces can be seen more of these birdlike flames of fire
fluttering to their destructive work in the distance. The power of the
fire demon is at its height.
And now the servants of the water demon, the firemen, dismayed and
excited, fall back a pace, only to return and with the strength of
water at their command assail the power of the fire again. Streams
of water are now spouting from a score of nozzles. A group of eight
firemen, guided by a rotund battalion chief who is speaking through
a trumpet, ascends the steps of a nearby doorway and gropes its way
through the dark halls to apartments where frightened human beings may
be cowering, too crazed by fear to undertake to rescue themselves.
Another group of eight is to be seen working its way with scaling
ladders to the roof of another building. They carry ropes which they
hang over the eaves, thus constructing a means of egress for those who
are willing and hardy enough to lay hold and descend in this fashion.
Still another group of eight is spreading a net into which hovering,
fear-crazed victims calling from windows above are commanded to jump.
Through it all the regular puffing of the engines, the muffled voices
of the captains shouting, and the rattling beat of the water as it
plays upon the walls and batters its way through the windows and doors,
can be heard as a monotone, the chorus of this grand contest in which
man seeks for mastery over an element.
And yet the fire continues to burn. It catches a dressmaker who has
occupied the rear rooms of the third floor of the building, two doors
away from that of the paint-dealer’s shop, and while she is still
waving frantically for aid she is enveloped with a glorious golden
shroud of fire which hides her completely. It rushes to where a lame
flower-maker, Ziltman, is groping agonizedly before his windows on the
fifth floor of another tenement, and sends into his nostrils a volume
of thick smoke which smothers him entirely. It sends long streamers
of flame licking about doorposts and window frames of still other
buildings, filling stairways and area-landings with great dark clouds
of vapor and bursting forth in lurid, sinister flashes from nooks and
corners where up to now fire has not been suspected. It appears to be
an all-devouring Nemesis, feeding as a hungry lion upon this ruck of
wooden provender and this wealth of human life. The bodies of stricken
human beings are but fuel for it--but small additions to its spirals of
smoke and its tongues of flame.
And yet these battalions of fighters are not to be discouraged. They
guess this element to be a blind one, indifferent alike to failure or
success. It may rage on and consume the whole city. It may soon be
compelled to slink back to a smoldering heap. It appears to desire
to burn fiercely, and yet they know that it will give way before its
logical foe. Upon it, now, they are heaping a score of streams, beating
at distant windows, tearing out distant doors, knocking the bricks from
their plastered places, of houses not on fire at all and so setting
up a barrier between it and other buildings, destroying in fact the
form and order of years in order to make a common level upon which its
enemy, water, can meet and defeat it.
But these little ants of beings, how they have scurried before this
battle royal between these two elements! How fallen! How harried and
bereft and tortured they seem! Under these now blackened and charred
timbers and fallen bricks and stones and twisted plates of iron are
not a few of them, dead. And beyond the still tempestuous battlefield,
where flame and water still fight, are thousands more of them, agape
with wonder and fear and pity. They do not know what water is, nor
fire. They only know what they do, how dangerous they are, how really
deadly and how indifferent to their wishes or desires. Forefend!
forefend! is the wisest thought that comes to them, else these twain,
and other strange and terrible things like them, will devour us all.
But these elements. Here they are and here they continue to battle
until a given quantity of water has been able to overcome a given
amount of fire. Like the fabled battle between the Efrit and the King’s
daughter, they have fought each other over rooftops and in cellars and
in the very air, where flame and water meet, and under twisted piles
of timber and iron and stone. Wherever any of the snaky heads of the
demon fire have shown themselves, the flattened gusts of the demon
water have assailed them. The two have fought in crevices where no
human hand could reach. They have grappled with one another in titanic
writhings above the rooftops, where the eyes of all men could see. They
have followed one another to unexpected depths, fire showing itself
wherever water has neglected to remain, the water returning where the
fire has begun its battling anew. They have chased and twisted and
turned, until at last, out-generaled in this instance, fire has receded
and water conquered all.
But the petty little creatures who have been the victims of their
contest, the chance occupants of the field upon which they chose to
battle. But look at them now, agape with wonder and terror. And how
they scurried! How jumped from the windows into nets, how clambered
like monkeys down ladders, how gropingly they have staggered through
halls of smoke, thick, rich smoke, as dark and soft and smooth as the
fleece of a ram and as deadly as death.
And now small men, shocked by all that has befallen, gather and
congratulate themselves on their victory or meditate on and bemoan
their losses. The terror of it all!
“I say, John,” says the battalion chief of the second division to the
battalion chief of the first, “that was something of a fire, eh?”
“It was that,” agrees the latter, looking grimly from under the rim of
his wet red helmet.
“That Dutchman must have had a half-dozen barrels of naphtha or
gasoline down there to cause such a blowup as that. Why, that last
blast, just before I got here, sent the roof off, they tell me.”
“It did that,” returns the other thoughtfully. “There’ll be a big
rumpus about it in the papers to-morrow. They ought to inspect these
places better.”
“That’s right. Well, he got his fill. His wife’s down there now, I
think, and his baby. He ain’t been seen since the first explosion.”
“Too bad. But they oughtn’t to do such things. They know the danger of
it. Still, you never can tell ’em nothin’.”
THE CAR YARD
If I were a painter one of the first things I would paint would be one
or another of the great railroad yards that abound in every city, those
in New York and Chicago being as interesting as any. Only I fear that
my brush would never rest with one portrait. There would be pictures
of it in sunshine and cloud, in rain and snow, in light and dark, and
when heat caused the rails and the cars to bake and shimmer, and the
bitter cold the mixture of smoke and steam to ascend in tall, graceful,
rhythmic plumes that appear to be composed of superimposed circles and
spirals of smoke and mist.
The variety of the cars. The variety of their contents. The long
distances and differing climates and countries from which they have
come--the Canadian snows, the Mexican uplands, Florida, California,
Texas and Maine. As a boy, in the different cities and towns in which
our family dwelt, I was forever arrested by the spectacle of these
great freight trains, yellow, white, red, blue, green, toiling through
or dissipating themselves in some terminal maze of tracks. I was always
interested to note how certain cars, having reached their destination,
would be sidetracked and left, and then presently the consignee or his
agent or expressman would appear and the car be opened. Ice, potatoes,
beef, furniture, machinery, boxed shipments of all kinds, would be
taken out by some lone worker who, having come with a wagon, would
back it up to the opened door and remove the contents. Most interesting
of all to me were the immense shipments of live stock, the pigs, sheep,
steers, on their last fatal journey and looking so non-understandingly
out upon the strange world in which they found themselves, and baa-ing
or moo-ing or squealing in tones that gave evidence of the uncertainty,
the distress and the wonder that was theirs.
For a time in Chicago, between my eighteenth and nineteenth years, I
was employed as a car-tracer in one of the great freight terminals of
a railroad entering Chicago, a huge, windy, forsaken realm far out on
the great prairie west of the city and harboring literally a thousand
or more cars. And into it and from it would move such long freight
trains, heavy with snow occasionally, or drenched with rain, and
presenting such a variety of things in cars: coal, iron, cattle, beef,
which would here be separated and entangled with or disentangled from
many others and then moved on again in the form of other long trains.
The clanging engine bells, the puffing stacks, the arresting, colorful
brakemen and trainmen in their caps, short, thick coats, dirty gloves,
and with their indispensable lanterns over their arms. In December and
January, when the days were short and the nights fell early, I found
myself with long lists of car numbers, covering cars in transit and
concerning which or their contents owners or shippers were no doubt
anxious, hurrying here and there, now up and down long tracks, or under
or between the somber cars that lined them, studying by the aid of my
lantern the tags and car numbers, seeing if the original labels or
addresses were still intact, whether the seals had remained unbroken,
on what track the car was, and about where, and checking these various
items on the slip given me, and, all being correct, writing O. K.
across the face of it all. Betimes I would find a consigned car
already in place on some far sidetrack, the consignee having already
been notified, and some lone worker with a wagon busily removing
the contents. Sometimes, being in doubt, I would demand to see the
authorization, and then report. But except for occasional cars, that
however accurately billed never seemed to appear, no other thing went
wrong.
Subsequent to that time I have always been interested by these great
tangles. Seeing them as in New York facing river banks where ships
await their cargoes, or surrounded by the tall coal pockets and grain
elevators of a crowded commercial section, I have often thought how
typical of the shift and change of life they are, how peculiarly of
this day and no other. Imagine a Roman, a Greek, an Egyptian or an
Assyrian being shown one of these immense freight yards with their
confusing mass of cars, their engines, bells, spirals of smoke and
steam, their interesting variety of color, form and movement. How
impossible to explain to such an one the mechanism if not the meaning
of it all. How impossible it would be for him to identify what he
saw with anything that he knew. The mysterious engines, the tireless
switching, the lights, the bells, the vehicles, the trainmen and
officials. And as far as some future age that yet may be is concerned,
all that one sees here or that relates to this form of transportation
may even in the course of a few hundred years have vanished as
completely as have the old caravanseries of the Orient--rails, cars,
engines, coal and smoke and steam, even the intricate processes by
which present freight exchange is effected. And something entirely
different may have come in its place, transportation by air, for
instance, the very mechanism of flight and carriage directed by
wireless from given centers.
[Illustration: The Car Yard]
And yet, as far as life itself is concerned, its strife and change,
how typical of it are these present great yards with their unending
evidences of movement and change. These cars that come and go, how
heavy now with freight, or import; how empty now of anything suggesting
service or use even, standing like idle, unneeded persons upon some
desolate track, while the thunder of life and exchange passes far
to one side. And anon, as in life, each and every one of them finds
itself in the very thick of life, thundering along iron rails from
city to city, themselves, or rather their contents, eagerly awaited
and welcomed and sought after, and again left, as before. And then the
old cars, battered and sway-backed by time and the elements and long
service, standing here and there unused and useless, their chassis bent
and sometimes cracked by undue strain or rust, their sides bulging,
their roofs and doors decayed and warped or broken, quite ready for
that limbo of old cars, the junk yard rather than the repair shop.
And yet they have been so useful, have seen and done so much, been in
such varied and interesting places--the cities, the towns, the country
stations, the lone sidings where they have waited or rolled in sun
and rain. Here in this particular New York yard over which I am now
brooding, upon a great viaduct which commands it all, is one old car,
recently emptied of its load of grain, about which on this winter’s
day a flock of colorful pigeons are rising and falling, odd companions
for such a lumbering and cumbersome thing, yet so friendly to and
companionable with it, some of them walking peacefully upon its roof,
others picking up remaining grains within its open door, others on the
snowy ground before it picking still other fallen grains, and not at
all disturbed by the puffing engines elsewhere. It might as well be a
great boat accompanied by a cloud of gulls. And that other car there,
that dusty, yellow one, labeled Central of Georgia, yet from which
now a great wagonful of Christmas trees is being taken from Georgia,
or where? Has it been to Maine or Labrador or the Canadian north for
these, and where will it go, from here, and how soon? Leaning upon this
great viaduct that crosses this maze of tracks and commands so many of
them, a great and interesting spectacle, I am curious as to the history
or the lives of these cars, each and every one, the character of the
places and lives among which each and every one of them has passed its
days. They appear so wooden, so lumpish, so inert and cumbersome and
yet the places they have been, the things they have seen!
I am told by the physicists that each and every atom of all of this
wealth of timber and steel before me is as alive as life; that it
consists, each and every particle, of a central spicule of positive
energy about which revolve at great speed lesser spicules of negative
energy. And so these same continue to revolve until each particular
atom, for some chemic or electronic reason, shall have been dissolved,
when forthwith these spicules re-arrange themselves into new forms,
to revolve as industriously and as unceasingly as before. Springs the
thought then: Is anything inert, lacking in response, perception, mood?
And if not, what may each of these individual cars with their wealth
of experience and observation think of this life, their place in it,
their journeys and their strange and equally restless and unknowing
companion, man?
THE FLIGHT OF PIGEONS
In all the city there is no more beautiful sight than that which is
contributed by the flight of pigeons. You may see them flying in one
place and another, here over the towering stacks of some tall factory,
there over the low roofs of some workaday neighborhood; the yard of a
laborer, the roof of some immense office building, the eaves of a shed
or barn furnishing them shelter and a point of rendezvous from which
they sail. I have seen them at morning, when the sky was like silver,
turning in joyous circles so high that the size of a large flock of
forty was no more than a hand’s breadth. I have seen them again at
evening, wheeling and turning in a light which was amethystine in its
texture, so soft that they seemed swimming in a world of dream. In the
glow of a radiant sunset, against the bosom of lowering storm clouds,
when the turn of a wing made them look like a handful of snowflakes, or
the shafts of the evening sunlight turned their bodies to gold, I have
watched them soaring, soaring, soaring, running like children, laughing
down the bosom of the wind, wheeling, shifting, rising, falling,
the one idyllic note in a world of commonplace--or, perhaps more
truthfully, the key central of what is a heavenly scene of beauty.
[Illustration: The Flight of Pigeons]
I do not know what it is that makes pigeons so interesting to me,
unless it is that this flight of theirs into the upper world is to
me the essence of things poetic, the one thing which I should like to
do myself. The sunny sides of the barnyard roofs they occupy, the quiet
beauty of the yards in which they live, their graceful and contented
acceptance of the simple and the commonplace, their cooing ease, the
charm of the landscapes over which they fly and against the outlines of
which they are so often artistically engraved, are to me of the essence
of the beautiful. I can think of nothing better. If I were to have the
privilege of reincarnation I might even choose to be a pigeon.
And, in connection with this, I have so often asked myself what there
is in pure motion which is so delightful, so enchanting, and before
the mystery of which, as manifested by the flight of pigeons my mind
pauses, for it finds no ready solution. The poetry of music, the poetry
of motion, the arch-significance of a graceful line in flight--these
are of psychic, perhaps of chemic subtlety (who knows?), blending into
some great scheme of universal rhythm, of which singing, dancing,
running, flying, the sinuous curvings of rivers, the rhythmic wavings
of trees, the blowings and restings of the winds, and every other
lovely thing of which the earth is heir, are but integral parts.
Nature has many secrets all her own. We peer and search. With her
ill moods we quarrel. Over her savageries we weep or rage. In her
amethystine hours of ease and rest we rest also and wonder, moved to
profound and regal melancholy over our own brief hours in her light, to
unreasoned joy and laughter over her beauty in her better moods, their
pensive exaltation.
As for myself, I only know that whenever I see these birds, their coats
of fused slate and bright metallic colors shielding them so smoothly,
their feet of coral, their eyes of liquid black, smooth-rimmed with
pink, and strutting so soberly at ease on every barn roof or walk
or turning, awing, in some heavenly light against a sky of blue or
storm-black--I only know that once more a fugue of most delicate and
airy mood is being fingered, that the rendition of another song is at
hand.
To fly so! To be a part of sky, sunlight, air! To be thus so delicately
and gracefully organized as to be able to rest upon the bosom of a
breeze, or run down its curving surface in long flights, to have the
whole world-side for a spectacle, the sunny roof of a barn or a house
for a home! Not to brood over the immensities, perhaps, not to sigh
over the too-well-known end!
Fold you your hands and gaze.... They speak of joy accomplished.
Fold your hands and gaze. As you look you have that which they
bring--beauty. It is without flaw and without price.
ON BEING POOR
Poverty is so relative. I have lived to be thirty-two now, and am just
beginning to find that out. Hitherto, in no vague way, poverty to me
seemed to be indivisibly united with the lack of money. And this in the
face of a long series of experiences which should have proved to any
sane person that this was only relatively true. Without money, or at
times with so little that an ordinary day laborer would have scoffed at
my supply, I still found myself meditating gloomily and with much show
of reason upon the poverty of others. But what I was really complaining
of, if I had only known, was not poverty of material equipment (many
of those whom I pitied were materially as well if not better supplied
than I was) but poverty of mind, the most dreadful and inhibiting
and destroying of all forms of poverty. There are others, of course:
Poverty of strength, of courage, of skill. And in respect to no one
of these have I been rich, but poverty of mind, of the understanding,
of taste, of imagination--therein lies the true misery, the freezing
degradation of life.
For I walk through the streets of this great city--so many of them no
better than the one in which I live--and see thousands upon thousands,
materially no worse off than myself, many of them much better placed,
yet with whom I would not change places save under conditions that
could not be met, the principal one being that I be permitted to keep
my own mind, my own point of view. For here comes one whose clothes are
good but tasteless, or dirty; and I would not have his taste or his
dirt. And here is another whose shabby quarters cost him as much as do
mine and more, and yet I would not live in the region which he chooses
for half his rent, nor have his mistaken notion of what is order,
beauty, comfort. Nothing short of force could compel me. And here is
one sufficiently well dressed and housed, as well dressed and housed
as myself, who still consorts with friends from whom I could take no
comfort, creatures of so poor a mentality that it would be torture to
associate with them.